Is Tesla Musk’s “Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down”? – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 15th February 2025, 09:33 am

For those of us who were kids and watched action movies in the 1990s, things can get pretty weird. When the movies first came out, they were cool, realistic, and a little comical at times. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keanu Reeves, Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock, and a number of other famous actors are well-known for their work on the movies we grew up with.

While there were a few action films that held up really well and keep their cool factor to this day, time wasn’t as kind to many of them. In many cases, action films in the ’90s were equal parts corny and cool. The action was there just to set up the jokes in many cases, and the thin storylines led to more cringe than they once did.

Sadly, the 1994 movie Speed tends to fit into the latter category. The good guy is a little too “the one,” we all know that the bus would’ve exploded within 5 minutes in Los Angeles, and the bus jump — yeah, that wouldn’t have worked out. Tricking the bad guy with a VHS tape recording was a cool trick, though!

As usual, The Simpsons was on the case:

I recently saw a post on Bluesky that referenced this film when talking about Elon Musk. (Spoiler alert: Elon wouldn’t be played by Keanu Reeves in this comparison.)

His illiquidity is the danger. He has to keep doing shit like this. The Not Actually Real Money Bus must be kept above $200 billion or it will explode. All of this shit is basically debt and blackmail and it’s forcing people like Musk into increasingly precarious and dangerous positions.

— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T21:19:58.755Z

Like our old action films, the hero can’t stay cool forever. Elon Musk was once looked up to by many here at CleanTechnica, and many more people around the world, because we believed he was courageously and perhaps even selflessly taking on the biggest threats to the future of humanity’s existence. Piling up large sums of net worth was just a side effect of doing really smart and really good things, right?

But, in hindsight, we were cringe to think this. It turns out that Elon wasn’t the guy jumping on “the bus that couldn’t slow down” to save the day. He was actually the guy who put the bomb on the bus. He didn’t create Paypal — he was bought out and pushed out, walking away with a pile of cash and the X.com domain name. He then bought Tesla from its founders after hiring great people to start SpaceX. And the Hyperloop? All we got were tunnels under the Vegas strip with Teslas being driven inside by humans.

The truth is that billionaires (even the biggest ones) aren’t like Scrooge McDuck in DuckTales. They don’t keep a basement full of so much gold that they can swim in it. The billions of dollars tend to mostly if not almost all be tied up in companies and investments. So, taxing billionaires by net worth or unrealized capital gains isn’t realistic at all.

In fact, people with this kind of wealth often sit in a precarious position. They can’t sell shares in companies at volume or they’ll tank the stock. They can leverage those assets by borrowing against them, but the banks and other investors (some of whom are known to chop up people who make them mad) won’t be pleased if the value of the collateral is lost, or the value of what was bought with the borrowed money is lost.

With Tesla sales dropping everywhere despite overall EV sales continuing to rise, Elon Musk could end up in a pretty terrible position. Investors can only put up with so much value destruction before the board has no choice but to act in the fiduciary interest of shareholders. Banks relying on Tesla shares for collateral might decide they need to take action to protect themselves. Wealthy investors from countries that torture and kill might resort to insidious things as Xitter and Tesla both tank.

I don’t know enough about Musk’s finances to know at what speed the bus explodes, but I do see it slowing down. Hopefully we all don’t have to go off any jumps with him while he keeps it above 50.

Featured image: a screenshot from the 1994 movie Speed (fair use).